The latest book offering in a short line of SilverStripe books is an enjoyable read and full of useful and practical content. As I read through I kept a file noting little tips that were either completely new to me or were techniques that I should be making more use of, by the end of the book there were 49 of them.

After hours of playing around with ssh, sudo, user permissions etc. trying to deploy a PHP website from a Github repository, the best solution I could find was to not use Github at all. I am a big fan of Git and Github, but automatically deploying a website from a Github repository was very fiddly and in the end more trouble than it was worth.

The SilverStripe Payment module is really handy, its useful to have a payment module completely separate from ecommerce because it gives you so much freedom. The Payment-Test module is an ideal example of this. I used Payment-Test to create a basic booking system for instance, its a really good example of how to hook up a payment gateway to your site.

The User Forms SilverStripe module is super useful for creating forms. I often use it for contact page forms, recently I wanted to submit a contact form via AJAX which is pretty straight forward using SilverStripe's extension class.